bring the sunblock

Back in the spring of ’01, my college roommate and I decided to do a spring break. This was a fairly last minute decision, which resulted in minimal planning, and thereby leading to the following story.

We packed up his 2-door manual transmission Chevy Cavalier, added a cooler full of beer that filled up the trunk, and four guys with our luggage in the passenger area. We were going there for a full week, and all any of us brought was 2-3 tshirts, sandals, shorts, and a swimsuit. On short notice, we were able to book a hotel room at The Majestic, for the bargain rate of $50 a night! Boy weren’t we lucky!

After learning that our companions don’t know how to drive stick, my roommate and I handle the entire 16 hour drive (both ways). We arrived at our hotel, and find out that it is right on the beach. By this I mean you step out the door and into the sand. On. The. Beach.

So clearly, you avid readers may be wondering, “what kind of hotel costs $50 a day for a beachfront room on last minute notice?” The answer is, the kind that you see on cop shows with a dead hooker inside.

This room had one king size bed. The room was the size of the king sized bed. You had to climb over it to go to the bathroom. This wasn’t that big of a problem though, because the bathroom looked like it had been used to make bathtub meth.

We took this in stride, and I remember my roommate saying “Hey, not like we’re going to be in our own room a lot anyway”. I agreed to the sentiment, because our goal was to be awake at night and sleep on the beach during the day, so one king size bed for four dudes was not the problem it seemed to be.

Day one: fairly entertaining. One of our traveling companions made the mistake of pissing off a group of people with a water balloon slingshot, which resulted in him getting a water balloon fired into his crotch from 300 feet away. This had the very predictable effect of dropping him to the beach in a near coma. I pray you or your loved ones never have to hear the noise such a collision makes.

Day two: this is where things got interesting. My roommate and I were down the beach from our hotel about half a mile, hanging out at the hotel room of some of our old high school friends that we found were also in Panama City Beach. All in all, we’re basking in the glory of our decision to take this last minute trip, drinking beer in the sun, and generally feeling awesome.

Pride goeth before the fall, however, and this is when mother nature decided that our happiness was out of equilibrium. A storm front promptly moves in, and by storm front, I mean a sharp line of death-colored clouds quickly sweep in from the sea. Torrential rain follows, and chases us inside our friend’s hotel room. I have a picture from the moment the storm rolled in, and all you can see are reflections off of eyeballs and watches because its so dark it looks like night.

We then receive the following phone call from our traveling companions who have retreated to our hotel room:

“Uh, hey guys, the hotel room is flooding”
“What?! How bad?”
“Like a few inches….what should we do?”
“I guess just put the bags on the bed and wait it out?”
“Alright, I guess that’s all we can do”

We hangup, feeling a little nervous, but whatever, we’ll get a new hotel room and life will go on. Then we receive another phone call.

“Uh, hey guys, did you see that tornado?”
“WHAT?! No!”
“Well, I guess technically it was a waterspout up until it hit the beach. Then it became a tornado. And then it blew the roof off the hotel. So now, it’s really flooding in here.”

My roommate and I take off running down the beach back to our hotel, which really is a pretty terrible idea. It’s still raining a lot, there are waterspout/tornado/death funnels flying around, and we’re dodging things still flying through the air. We make it back to the hotel, and sure enough, the roof is gone from the building and has been deposited messily into the parking lot, missing our car by about 3 feet.

Everyone is OK, the beer survived, and we didn’t really have any luggage to ruin in the first place. Our room, however, has about 2 feet of brown, sludgelike water in it, thus rendering it even more uninhabitable than it was before. The kicker: the hotel manager doesn’t want to give us a refund for the rest of the week.

manager: “You guys paid in advance, and we can’t refund that if you go to another hotel”
roommate: “Sir, the roof staying on the damn building was part of the deal.”

Eventually they agreed to refund us and move everyone to another hotel, but only after the local fire department started hanging signs on the doors that said “Biohazard, do not enter”.

Ladies and gentlemen, here’s the plan: I know a lot of you out there have your own blogs, I’m fairly certain that all of you have about the same level of mental instability as I do. Therefore, I submit to you the topic for your next entry, if you so dare.

Everyone has been vacation.

Everyone has been on a bad vacation.

Let’s have a group therapy session and get it all out there. If we’re going to be sharing the blagosphere space, we might as know who our cellmates are. If you decide to partake, just post the link in the comments section along with a couple sentence teaser.

Let’s see if this thing has legs!